Booting issues when I remove a dead hard drive
by starfiend from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4YDX4)
Hi Folks,
The PC I have has six hard drives, 3 x 2TB and 3x 320GB. A few weeks ago I noticed that one of the drives was 'broken'. It made strange noises on boot up and the scratch directory it was configured for has basically disappeared. That in it self wasn't an issue as it was empty, so I didn't lose any data. Over last weekend I decided to remove it, and two of the other drives as I wasn't using them and thought I might be able to use them in another PC.
Anyway, using LSHW, I identified the serial numbers of the hard drives and from that removed the three drives I wanted out.
This is where my problems started. When I rebooted, the machine refused to boot, saying it couldn't find /dev/sde1. I took a closer look at my LSHW output and realised I'd been a bit careless when I'd initially built and installed the OS. My drives were:
/dev/sda1 (2TB) was /home and was on one of the mobo's own sata ports.
/dev/sdb1 (2TB) was /scratch and on the other mobo sata port.
The remaining disks are attached to a 4-port internal SATA card plugged into the mobo.
/dev/sdc (2TB) was completely broken, gparted refused to access anything, getting hung up trying to access this disk.
/dev/sdd (320GB) seems to have 4 partitions on it, a 1GB partition, which just shows up a 1 1gb partition on the desk top, an extended partition and 2 linux filesystem partitions, both of which show as 'unclaimed'.
/dev/sde (320GB) has three partitions: sde1 is / sde2 is /boot and /sde3 is the swap partition
/dev/sef (320GB) was showing as 'inaccessible', though I've no real idea what that actually means.
I put all the disks back in again and rebooted, and everything worked. It still worked when I removed the /dev/sdf drive, but I've now got to the point where I daren't remove anything else, particularly the broken drive, as I don't know whether I would be able to rescue the machine.
I checked my /etc/fstab file:
UUID=eecc5495-52ba-4d49-904b-e672979dbf71 / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=9651f7cf-e532-496c-a36f-c93067694524 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=881472db-aacd-48f0-bac9-e73df98070fa /home ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=797da8b6-107e-4747-b613-290934a5ead9 /scratch ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=edf44b99-6e03-48be-95d6-0e70566422d7 swap swap defaults 0 0
Physically rebuilding the machine so that I have the boot disk as /dev/sda and the /home as /dev/sdb is not difficult, but the machine is trying to boot from /dev/sde every time, whether or not there is a /dev/sde or not. I'me guessing that when I removed the sdc and sdd drives, wha was originally the sde drive was internally reconfigured to be sdc.
Is there any way that I can reconfigure this so that I can move the drives around and remove the drives I want removed? I've looked at what grub files I can find, but I'm completely confused, and in any case I cannot find any references to /dev/sde etc.
I'm using fedora 31
All drives except the completely broken one are Western Digital. The broken one is a Seagate.
Many thanks,
Dave
The PC I have has six hard drives, 3 x 2TB and 3x 320GB. A few weeks ago I noticed that one of the drives was 'broken'. It made strange noises on boot up and the scratch directory it was configured for has basically disappeared. That in it self wasn't an issue as it was empty, so I didn't lose any data. Over last weekend I decided to remove it, and two of the other drives as I wasn't using them and thought I might be able to use them in another PC.
Anyway, using LSHW, I identified the serial numbers of the hard drives and from that removed the three drives I wanted out.
This is where my problems started. When I rebooted, the machine refused to boot, saying it couldn't find /dev/sde1. I took a closer look at my LSHW output and realised I'd been a bit careless when I'd initially built and installed the OS. My drives were:
/dev/sda1 (2TB) was /home and was on one of the mobo's own sata ports.
/dev/sdb1 (2TB) was /scratch and on the other mobo sata port.
The remaining disks are attached to a 4-port internal SATA card plugged into the mobo.
/dev/sdc (2TB) was completely broken, gparted refused to access anything, getting hung up trying to access this disk.
/dev/sdd (320GB) seems to have 4 partitions on it, a 1GB partition, which just shows up a 1 1gb partition on the desk top, an extended partition and 2 linux filesystem partitions, both of which show as 'unclaimed'.
/dev/sde (320GB) has three partitions: sde1 is / sde2 is /boot and /sde3 is the swap partition
/dev/sef (320GB) was showing as 'inaccessible', though I've no real idea what that actually means.
I put all the disks back in again and rebooted, and everything worked. It still worked when I removed the /dev/sdf drive, but I've now got to the point where I daren't remove anything else, particularly the broken drive, as I don't know whether I would be able to rescue the machine.
I checked my /etc/fstab file:
UUID=eecc5495-52ba-4d49-904b-e672979dbf71 / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=9651f7cf-e532-496c-a36f-c93067694524 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=881472db-aacd-48f0-bac9-e73df98070fa /home ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=797da8b6-107e-4747-b613-290934a5ead9 /scratch ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=edf44b99-6e03-48be-95d6-0e70566422d7 swap swap defaults 0 0
Physically rebuilding the machine so that I have the boot disk as /dev/sda and the /home as /dev/sdb is not difficult, but the machine is trying to boot from /dev/sde every time, whether or not there is a /dev/sde or not. I'me guessing that when I removed the sdc and sdd drives, wha was originally the sde drive was internally reconfigured to be sdc.
Is there any way that I can reconfigure this so that I can move the drives around and remove the drives I want removed? I've looked at what grub files I can find, but I'm completely confused, and in any case I cannot find any references to /dev/sde etc.
I'm using fedora 31
All drives except the completely broken one are Western Digital. The broken one is a Seagate.
Many thanks,
Dave